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Always the best year-end compilation. And M83’s Outro in the end was an emotional sentence.

Branko Burcksen

Hats off to Matt Shapiro. He really knows the right way to combine image and music into a dramatic arc.

I am also beyond grateful to him for including what I think is the best movie of 2012, “Madoka Magica”. It’s one appearance flash by so fast I had to watch it twice and check his list of movies to make sure I hadn’t gone insane. Sure enough, it’s right there at 05:02:04.

Some others I might have liked to see, although they weren’t released in the US this year, so I won’t complain. But still, I’d watch it if those two were there. I mean, Atlas Shrugged Part II is there.

I’ve talked to him regarding what is/isn’t in this, and there is a very practical reason. This year, his main goal was to be able to carve a story out of as many films as he could. The way he did it, which I think is brilliant, was to practically create a flip book, emphasizing the similarities between so many movies that could not be more different.

It’s not unlike Cloud Atlas, in which three filmmakers used six stories to tell one across ~ three hours. Matt, however, is one filmmaker who used over a hundred stories to tell his own story in five minutes. I know that towards the end of the process, he was searching through hundreds of 2012 movies and scripts to put all the pieces together. This required him to use stuff that he didn’t want to, and prevented him from putting things he did. The Turin Horse was one of those films.

These end-of-the-year mashups are about one thing: movie magic. Editors like Matt Shapiro, Gen Ip, etc. are able to convince most of us that films like Atlas Shrugged Part II and Gayby (I haven’t seen either, to be fair) are pieces of an amazing year for film. They are using the footage available to them to make something amazing on its own; something that may be better than some of its individual parts.

tl;dr It’s a bit silly to belabor over what is and is not included in these, given the kind of constraints that come with these kinds of projects, isn’t it?